Cooper’s attempted suicide made the News at Ten. She watched, mulling over the events that had followed her meeting with Harris. She’d spent an hour with Tobias and the assistant chief constable and both, for very different reasons, refuted her argument and insisted on the conference.

On screen, yet more library Woodsman footage and lurid Nia Hopkins details were churned out and Anna watched as her own face was paraded as the detective re-examining the evidence in the case of Emily Risman. Harris’s delivery was deadpan, devoid of anything but the most essential background information as to Cooper’s state of mind. When asked if he was still in police custody, Harris trotted out, ‘Neville Cooper is still helping us with our inquiries. However, he has been released from custody and we are exploring other lines of inquiry.’

There was, as expected, no mention of Wyngate. Anna’d fought the suggestion that she should take part in this little fiasco and had won that small skirmish. But they’d filmed her leaving the nick and her hurried exit was tagged on to the report, making her look like a fleeing suspect in her own right. Watching it in her flat, and feeling the misgivings rumbling in her gut, she knew it had been the right thing not to appear at the conference. She did not want to be associated directly with Harris and his squad. It didn’t feel right.

The nagging certainty that she knew the answer to all of this itched in an unreachable place inside her head. The pattern was here and all she needed to do was see it. Anna was convinced that something set up an auto-search function in her head for unanswered conundrums. Eventually, it would complete its search and present the memories to her, fully formed as an answer. But whereas, in most people, this happened silently, in Anna her right brain algorithm fluttered constantly like a damaged moth against a lit window and there wasn’t much she could do about it except get on with the day to day and wait for it to break through.

Her eyes drifted from the screen momentarily to the room around her. One of millions in which the images were being viewed. In one of those rooms this throw-away news item was going to cause irritation in the killer’s mind, and possibly something much, much worse.

---

One of her phones woke her some time during the night. She fumbled for them both, saw it was non-work and picked up in a semiconscious stupor. She croaked a hello, but heard nothing except muffled sounds and static in reply, before the ring tone mercifully intervened as whoever was on the other end killed the call. She didn’t even open her eyes to look at the clock.

In the morning, she half believed she’d dreamed it, but her call log showed the number to be a landline. When she arrived at Portishead, she gave it to Trisha to run, but the analyst frowned and said, ‘I know that number.’

‘How?’

Trisha consulted her screen and nodded. ‘There. It’s in the file, ma’am. The address is Beacon Cottage, Alburton.’

‘Charles Willis?’

‘That’s right. Would you like me to ring it, ma’am?’

Anna nodded, mind whirring.

After several seconds, Trisha shook her head. ‘Engaged, ma’am.’

‘I’ve tried twice already, too.’

‘Phone off the hook?’

‘Possibly.’

‘You sound a little anxious, ma’am.’

‘Do I? I don’t like calls at two thirty in the morning. In my experience, it usually means bad news. Keep trying, Trisha.’

Once Khosa and Holder arrived, Anna summoned them to the whiteboard.

‘OK. Let’s consolidate. Shaw has been too big a distraction. Justin, where are we with forensics?’

‘We’ve managed to trace most of the samples, ma’am, though there was nothing on the nail swabs or on Emily’s clothing. No blood or semen. Little or no fibre contamination.’

‘But we know Roger Willis was not surprised to learn that he was the father of Emily’s unborn child, am I right?’

Holder nodded. ‘Given Emily’s history, we know there were other possibilities but, as I said, the DNA matched up with him.’

‘Let’s get confirmatory testing done on that. In-house if possible, but use Chepstow if needed. And go and knock on Forensics’ door. We need all this pushed.’

Holder nodded.

‘OK. Ryia, I want you to concentrate on the van driver’s statement that was never presented as evidence. The one we found in Maddox’s handwriting on the torn sheet in his notebook. We need to find that man, if he’s still alive.’

Khosa nodded.

The whiteboard was filling up, arrows branching off from the main photograph of Emily Risman in a network of interconnected threads.

‘And, of course, there’s Wyngate.’

Trisha shook her head. ‘I’ve been unable to contact John Wyngate, ma’am.’

‘What a surprise.’

‘But I do have an address for Briggs.’

‘Good. I’ll need to speak to him at some point, too.’

Trisha picked an envelope off her desk. ‘Oh, and this came for you yesterday, ma’am.’

Anna took the large manila envelope addressed in a firm neat hand and opened it. Inside was a handwritten note and two pages of typed A4. The note was brief and to the point.

Dear Inspector Gwynne,

As requested, I’ve looked through my diary and jotted down the events that were not routine. That means I’ve left out trips to Sainsbury’s and concentrated on things that I deemed noteworthy. As you suggested, I’ve written them out and signed the note. I hope it helps. If you think I ought to go back further, just let me know. It’s less tedious than marking year nine projects!

Yours sincerely,

Megan Roberts

Anna took the sheets out and forced her brain to concentrate. There were trips to the cinema, restaurants, dentists, shopping in Bath, and hiking trips on two of the Sundays in the twelve-week period covered. Megan Roberts had copied her entries verbatim and the term she used to apply to these trips were ‘jaunts’. It was the second of these that drew Anna’s attention.

Sunday, 15 June. Up with the sun this morning for our jaunt to the Forest. Luke made egg and bacon but managed to burn the toast. Away by seven thirty on a beautiful morning…

As she read this simple account, Anna’s pulse began to pick up. There were a hundred forests Megan Roberts could be referring to and yet…

We arrived at Wenchford at 9 and despite the fine morning found it deliciously deserted. We decided to do the walk in reverse, for the hell of it, and stood on the Drummer Boy Stone for a ‘photo op’. Luke tripped over the stile but had recovered by the time we’d climbed to the viewpoint, which overlooked the Blakeney Straits. We could see Blakeney village and the Cotswolds clearly in the distance…

Blakeney. She’d seen signs for Blakeney when they’d visited the Rismans. She googled it and found it easily. Blakeney was exactly where she’d thought it to be. Less than two miles from Millend, on the edge of the Forest of Dean.

Face flushing, she read on. There was little or no further reference to any place names, just a small essay on how much Megan and her boyfriend enjoyed the day. But there was enough for the germ of an idea to take root in Anna’s head and turn the fluttering disquiet that had not left her since reading Tobias’s file up a notch.

‘Ryia, have a word with the Thames Valley team investigating the rapes. Find out if any of the victims visited the Forest of Dean in the three months before their attacks. No, make it six months. See if they got within half a dozen miles of Blakeney.’

Khosa wrote something down and nodded. Anna told them about the phone call in the night. Neither of them had any real explanation. She tried the Willises’ number again on her mobile. A call to BT confirmed no fault on the line.

‘Well, there’s only one way to find out why they called,’ Anna said. She grabbed her coat and, pondering Megan Roberts’ information, headed north.

---

Anna arrived at the Willises’ cottage at 11.20 a.m. The scene, as before, was idyllic. The day had mellowed and the backdrop that nature had painted made Anna think of old chocolate boxes. Clouds raced overhead against a robin’s-egg blue sky, the breeze ruffling what little foliage was left on the trees. Once again, the adjacent farm’s contribution to the day was less than ideal, with a fresh pungent bouquet of sprayed slurry hanging in the air.

Anna noted that the Isuzu was missing, though the Astra was parked in front of the garages. Three milk bottles stood on the step inside the porch, together with half a dozen eggs in an open, torn, cardboard egg carton. Most of the eggs were covered in feathers and dark material, which could, in Anna’s opinion, have been almost anything.

It’s called the countryside, Anna, she reminded herself.

She rang the bell and stared down at the eggs with a grimace. When no reply came with the third ring, she followed some crazy paving around to the rear, impressed again by the neat garden. She knocked firmly on the back door. It made the latch rattle. After three knocks, she put her hand on the handle and opened the door. Silence, dense and complete, was all that met her straining ears.

At first, all she did was to lean in and sing out, ‘Hello? Is there anybody home?’

When no one answered, Anna stepped into the narrow hall, mentally preparing a little apology for when Willis or his wife would appear.

From the hall, she could see into the kitchen at an acute angle. She caught sight of a small spill of flour on the surface of the butcher’s console. Spilled flour wasn’t something you left lying around unless you were in the middle of baking.

She sang out another greeting. ‘Hello? Anyone home?’

A waft of breeze from the open door behind her caught the flour and sent a powdery spiral into the air. Anna took a step forward into the kitchen with her hand outstretched as if to try to catch the plume. A sizeable mound had spilled and accumulated on the floor beneath the block. Her eyes followed more abandoned things; a broken plate, an overturned knife block, something dark on the wooden floor. It looked like spattered liquid. Oil, perhaps. Not much, but Anna stepped over it, her awareness ratcheting up. The door leading out to the workshop and back garden stood open and she stepped through.

The workshop door was slightly ajar. She crossed to it, poked it open with her foot and froze. The room had been trashed. Shards of pottery littered the floor, shelves had been ripped down, Gail Willis’s delicate creations now nothing more than rubble and dust. But it did not look like anything systematic. More as if some awful violent storm had visited this space and left a trail of mayhem.

Anna stepped quickly back out into the garden. Outside, all was quiet except for the noise of her heart hammering in her own ears.

An overwhelming sense of foreboding overtook her. She needed to call this in. Get some uniforms over and…

She saw it then. At the end of the garden, where it led to open fields. A patch of lawn and beyond that a bed that in the spring might harbour flowers, but now showed only the desiccated yellow stalks of sedums, and… something beyond… incongruous, blue, extending out of the black earth to a point where it was covered by an arrangement of branches and sticks.

Anna took some quick steps along the edge of a sodden path, signs of something heavy dragged along the ground evident in the flattening of the grass. She got to within six feet and stopped. He hadn’t tried too hard to hide the body, but he had done enough to leave his trademark arrangement. The clumsy tent of sticks and branches, which she’d seen in the SOC photos old and new, bore no relationship to the careful and elaborate arrangement that sat on the earth. The whole thing was held together by a woven circlet of long twigs. It looked symbolic and arcane. She had no idea what it meant and guessed that its true meaning might only be known to one mind. One very disturbed mind. Trembling, she let her eyes drop through the gaps in the wooden totem to the horror beneath.

Gail Willis lay on her front, half out of the shallow grave he’d dug for her, one hand resting on the earth. Just like Emily Risman and Nia Hopkins.

All the air escaped from Anna’s lungs in a rush. She turned away, retching drily, tears of horror and rage springing to her eyes and coursing down her face. The dull roar of a transatlantic jet high overhead was the only sound. Even the birds were quiet. Anna looked up, acutely aware that she was alone in this garden but convinced all of a sudden that she was not. The Woodsman had been to this cottage and he could still be here, watching, waiting. She sucked in oxygen, her mind incapable of coherent thought, as the instinct to run as far away as possible kicked in.

She turned, stepping madly to one side, not wanting to contaminate the crime scene any more than she had already. She walked around the outside of the cottage, heading for her car, unable to wash out the stench of slurry that clung to her nostrils, that she would now always associate with violent death. Yanking open the car door, she clambered in and rang Holder.

It was then that she thought of Charles Willis. She’d run away without even finding out if he was still alive, or perhaps injured. The dreaded prospect of having to go back and search the house brought out, to her consternation, an involuntary moan of denial. But what if the Woodsman was still there? Stalking her, waiting for his chance. Sense, that rarest of commodities, finally took charge. She was alone and unarmed at a murder scene with the real possibility that the killer was still in the vicinity. It would be foolhardy to put herself in danger.

Shipwright’s voice echoed in her head. Do not fly solo, Anna.

She found a foothold on that treacherous slope of shock she’d been sliding down, put the car in gear and drove out, retracing the two miles to the turning off the main road where she parked on the verge. A part of her knew that her reaction, as weak as it seemed, was normal and human and the correct thing to do. And this iota of insight provided a crumb of comfort. But fear still prickled the hair on her scalp and made her glance in the rear-view mirror every couple of seconds, hissing like white noise in her head.

When, several minutes later, blue lights danced on the distant horizon and the strident siren’s wail reached her, relief washed over her like a warm bath. Anna flagged down the patrol car, flashed her warrant card and led them back to Beacon Cottage.

---

Holder and Khosa came later, after the local uniforms and local CID, and Anna let them take the weight until Harris arrived with his posse of serious crime officers to take over. After watching the white-clad CSI team crawling over the place like white-suited ants, Anna called her squad together. It was getting dark now and the temperature was plummeting. They sat in her car and she switched on the engine to try to get some heat working, but in the light from the harsh xenon lamps that lit up the house like an airport runway, their breath plumed out like word balloons as they spoke.

‘There is no sign of Charles Willis, ma’am,’ Khosa said.

Anna sighed. ‘I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Is it possible he got away?’

Holder shrugged. ‘The Isuzu is missing and the workshop is a complete mess. But there’s also blood in Willis’s office.’

‘When I let myself imagine what went on there… Charles Willis is almost blind.’ Anna shook her head. ‘He can’t have taken the jeep. Are there signs of forced entry?’

‘No,’ Khosa said.

‘So, who rang me last night?’

Khosa shrugged. ‘Yours was the latest entry on the electronic phone book on his PC. Your number was still up on the screen. Perhaps he got through in desperation and was then caught.’

Anna shivered.

‘And there’s one more thing, ma’am,’ Holder said. ‘It seems Osbourne didn’t go home last night.’

‘Osbourne?’ Anna looked from Khosa to Holder. Neither of them offered an explanation and so her imagination filled in the blanks. ‘We should have been more careful. We should have played this another way.’

‘How could we have, ma’am?’ Khosa asked.

‘I don’t know. But if Osbourne’s involved… why take Willis?’

‘That’s one on a list of a dozen questions I’ve got, ma’am,’ Khosa replied.

Holder stared at them. ‘Hang on, are you saying that Osbourne did this?’

Anna shrugged. ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps whoever did do it has taken Roger Willis and Osbourne, too. But I think our priority has to be finding Osbourne, and quickly.’

Khosa shook her head. ‘But why did he have to do that to Gail Willis?’

That was a better question. One that Anna considered carefully before answering.

‘Who knows. Perhaps he can’t help himself now. Killing Nia to re-implicate Cooper had a kind of twisted logic to it. Thanks to Gloucester’s heavy- handedness Cooper’s in hospital, but he’s no longer in custody. That’s not helping because it means our killer’s plan isn’t working and he may be getting desperate. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to apply logic here.’

Holder shrugged. ‘It’s as if he wants us to know he’s out there.’

Anna nodded.

Holder banged his hand down on the dash. ‘How the hell did they miss this bastard the first time around?’

Anna didn’t answer but she risked a glance at Harris outside in the harsh lights, his gaze anchored firmly on the cottage. He’d not spoken to her since he’d arrived, preferring to use Slack as his go-between. She knew why. He was fearful of being ridiculed, of her crowing, ‘I told you so.’

She didn’t pretend that it hadn’t crossed her mind, but she’d dismissed it instantly. A woman had died here. Anna had no appetite for one-upmanship or copper banter. But Harris was a different breed.

‘Are we any further forward with anything else?’ she asked.

Khosa answered. ‘Trisha is still trying to trace the van driver, uh… Stanton. We’ve tracked him to two addresses but he’s moved on. I’ll get on to it again tomorrow.’

‘There is one other thing. I think it would be wise to liaise with the rape team. I think we may have found their serial attacker.’

Holder and Khosa both snapped their heads up.

‘I know how this is going to sound, but it’s possible we may be looking at the reverse of the usual pattern. Let’s go with Osbourne for now. If it is him, we know he killed Emily in a rage. She’d been having intercourse with him from a young age. If she said no to him, for whatever reason – the pregnancy maybe – he could have lost it and killed her. He got lucky, Cooper was an easy scapegoat, but Osbourne’s pattern of behaviour might have been set in that one incident with Emily. Perhaps he thinks he’s lucky, is being protected by a higher power, who bloody knows what’s going on in his head. But he’s been attacking women since that time. And instead of letting it escalate, he’s controlled himself, avoided killing until he really had to.’

‘But how does that explain Gail Willis?’ Khosa looked confused.

Anna sighed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s finally lost control. Whatever the reason, he’s out in the open now. And we need to stop him before he does this again.’

‘We should try to correlate the rapes with Osbourne’s known movements,’ Holder suggested.

‘I’ll see to it. I’ll get an APW out for Osbourne nationwide,’ Khosa said.

‘So, Emily Risman’s pregnancy…?’ Holder let his words trickle out as a question.

‘Might have been the final insult to Osbourne,’ Khosa muttered.

Holder thought about it and then nodded slowly. ‘That would fit. But it still doesn’t tell us why he’s taken Willis.’

‘That one I can’t begin to answer. Possibly he’s doing it because of something Willis knows, or even some sort of distorted revenge for what his brother did.’

‘Should we be concentrating on airports, docks, that sort of thing?’

‘We shouldn’t ignore them, that’s for sure.’

‘You don’t sound convinced, ma’am?’

‘Don’t I?’ she said. Holder was right. There was something else here that she was missing, but it was so far out of reach there was no point articulating that niggle. Not yet.

‘What are the chances of us finding Willis alive, ma’am?’ Khosa asked.

‘There is still a chance.’ Anna tried to put a positive spin on it. She needed to convince herself as much as anyone else. ‘The very fact that he wasn’t killed in the cottage is in our favour. And there won’t be a sexual motive there, but then again, who knows what’s going through this bloke’s mind.’

Slack’s face appeared at the car window, his nose and ears purple from the cold. ‘Thought you ought to know that Cooper’s condition is stabilising. It looks like he might be OK.’

‘Thank God for that,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t suppose there’s been any sign of Wyngate?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Is someone looking?’

Slack shrugged. ‘Been so many other things going on.’

Anna shook her head. ‘I’m uncomfortable with him out there, not knowing what he’s up to, because I’m sure he’s up to something.’

Slack glowered. ‘If it’s any consolation, I think DCI Harris would set the dogs on John Wyngate if he turned up, that’s for sure. What a total bloody balls-up.’